Living Dead in Dallas

dishes, so perhaps some humans did live here. He half-turned as we passed through, and nodded to me. He was wearing glasses and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. I didn’t have a chance to speak, because Isabel was ushering us into what appeared to be the dining room.
    Bill was tense. I might not be able to read his mind, but I knew him well enough to interpret the set of his shoulders. No vampire is ever comfortable entering another vamp’s territory. Vampires have as many rules and regulations as any other society; they just try to keep them secret. But I was figuring things out.
    Among all the vampires in the house, I quickly spotted the leader. He was one of those sitting at the long table in the large dining room. He was a total geek. That was my first impression. Then I realized that he was carefully disguised as a geek: he was quite . . . other. His sandy hair was slicked back, his physique was narrow and unimpressive, his black-rimmed glasses were sheer camouflage, and his pinstriped oxford cloth shirt was tucked into cotton-polyester blend pants. He was pale—well, duh—and freckled, with invisible eyelashes and minimal eyebrows.
    “Bill Compton,” the geek said.
    “Stan Davis,” Bill said.
    “Yeah, welcome to the city.” There was a faint trace of foreign accent in the geek’s voice. He used to be Stanislaus Davidowitz, I thought, and then wiped my mind clean like a slate. If any of them found out that every now and then I picked a stray thought out of thesilence of their minds, I’d be bloodless before I hit the floor.
    Even Bill didn’t know that.
    I packed the fear down in the cellar of my mind as the pale eyes fixed on me and scrutinized me feature by feature.
    “She comes in an agreeable package,” he said to Bill, and I supposed that was meant to be a compliment, a pat on the back, for Bill.
    Bill inclined his head.
    Vampires didn’t waste time saying a lot of things humans would under similar circumstances. A human executive would ask Bill how Eric, his boss, was doing; would threaten Bill a little in case I didn’t perform; would maybe introduce Bill and me to at least the more important people in the room. Not Stan Davis, head vampire. He lifted his hand, and a young Hispanic vampire with bristly black hair left the room and returned with a human girl in tow. When she saw me, she gave a screech and lunged, trying to break free of the grip the vampire had on her upper arm.
    “Help me,” she shrieked. “You have to help me!”
    I knew right away that she was stupid. After all, what could I do against a roomful of vampires? Her appeal was ridiculous. I told myself that several times, very fast, so I could go through with what I had to do.
    I caught her eyes, and held up my finger to tell her to be silent. Once she’d looked at me, locked on to me, she obeyed. I don’t have the hypnotic eyes of a vamp, but I don’t look the least bit threatening. I look exactly like the girl you’d see in a low-paying job any place in any town in the South: blond and bosomy and tan and young. Possibly, I don’t look very bright. But I think it’s more that people (and vampires) assume that if you’re pretty and blond and have a low-paying job, you are ipso facto dumb.
    I turned to Stan Davis, very grateful that Bill was right behind me. “Mr. Davis, you understand that I need more privacy when I question this girl. And I have to know what you need from her.”
    The girl began to sob. It was slow and heartrending, and almost unbelievably irritating under the circumstances.
    Davis’s pale eyes fastened on mine. He was not trying to glamour me, or subdue me; he was just examining me. “I understood your escort knew the terms of my agreement with his leader,” Stan Davis said. All right, I got the point. I was beneath contempt since I was a human. My talking to Stan was like a chicken talking to the buyer from KFC. But still, I had to know our goal. “I’m aware you met Area 5’s conditions,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could, “and I’m going to do my best. But without a goal, I can’t get started.”
    “We need to know where our brother is,” he said, after a pause.
    I tried not to look as astonished as I felt.
    As I’ve said, some vampires, like Bill, live by themselves. Others feel more secure in a cluster, called a nest. They call each other brother and sister when they’ve been in the same nest for a while, and some nests lasted decades. (One in New Orleans has